Exits

ARACHNIDAEA: LINE DRAWINGS

I.

Extravagance at dawn ―

your finest threads are strung with pearls

and you, a brooch with a clasp.

Magnify the shiny spheres

to divine that each conceals

a miniature, an image

of struggling wings, of life undone.

Pass at the critical angle,

and they flash and snap in the sun.

II.

These haunts are hung haphazardly

with votive offerings, each sucked dry;

paper maché sarcophagi,

cruel chrysalis for moth or butterfly.

III.

Serial killer.

Insecticide, the skill

in which you specialize.

Can we call it murder if nerves connect

not to brain but to canister, chain and gear,

if the dumb drive to survive directs

your every move? Or is it fear

that fuels your addiction to others’ pain,

a numbness spreading through the vein

as you rehearse, again, this ritual play ―

bind and consume in your quick, kinetic way.

IV.

A stickler for particulars,

you’re helpless to repel

the pull of perpendicular

the lure of parallel.

Do lines and circles insulate?

Can order keep at bay

the random drafts that propagate

contagion, death, decay?

The cords are taut. You draw control

from patterns meant to thwart

unraveling, but the tension takes its toll

on the mental weft and warp.

V.

A concert in the round!

Divertimenti scored for eight short hands

will be played by the maestro

for adoring fans.

The fine fretwork glistens.

The strings tune and go still.

Once in motion,

you dazzle in the parts for pizzicato,

leap with ease over fourths and fifths,

scuttle up scales to a dizzying height

then plummet, by octaves, to the sublime.

All are amused, for a time.

The circle is crossed by chords,

point to counterpoint,

illusions of balance, of words.

Listen to the last mournful strains

murmuring a requiem for the days.

VI.

The hours molt and fall away;

the year grows late.

Your web’s worn watch face ticks in whispers

and you pray that you will hibernate but briefly

and somehow wake.

As if by grace, the breaths of winter

fog the panes,

leave no trace

of love

or joy

or even hate.

There are, in the end,

only the frayed strands of time,

the failing light

and you, splayed at the center,

condemned to wait.

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SEEDS

A goldfinch whose yellow rivals the sun

could cull any bloom this garden has grown

yet favored a flowering long past blown,

its petals shriveled, stem brittle and dun

in a coneflower patch where just this one

seemed to wither, wilt and ask to be mown.

The bird plucked the seeds ensconced in the cone,

made it sway the way that metronomes run

till time runs out, till the goldfinch has flown.

One flower spent, the perennials sown —

a fête conceived by the dying and done

(though death, it’s said, may breed oblivion).

So many seeds were borne by each alone,

so many lost with loss of those I’ve known.

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LEAVES

For Shinayo Matsumoto

At ninety-one,

she still liked to arrange things

just so,

kept her possessions in tidy boxes,

some engraved with Asian motifs ―

dragonflies, exotic birds,

and leaves of bamboo.

And how she loved her sumo!

To watch, on the Japanese channel,

rikishi ten times her size

colliding like forces of nature

filled her with a sense of nostalgia

and possibility.

She was the venerable priestess of tea.

In the autumn of her age,

faithful to the rituals

of a dying art,

she distilled from the parched leaves

this pure nectar,

green as youth.

Flowers found perfection

in her hands,

wrinkled hands, with fingers like twigs.

Once, perhaps, as she trimmed the leaves,

she remembered a time when she

was that perfect flower,

blooming in her kimono

of peach and green.

Her family arranged

a simple Buddhist ceremony.

In late November, the trees

were mostly bare.

But across the lawn, beyond

the small gathering

and the somber stones,

the leaves all danced in the air.

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SYRINGE

Syrinx was a chaste water nymph who, pursued by Pan,

was mercifully transformed into hollow reeds.

By all accounts, she knew nothing of multiple sclerosis.

I.

These marks, my metric

of defiance and decline,

gauge a meniscus as the lumen fills

with fresh platoons of synthetic drug,

game as ever to deploy.

But what draws my eye this time

is the glint of syringe

― that crack in the slats where sun leaks through ―

I pry the blinds,

peer in

II.

As if the brain were lit by a strobe, flickering

between real and not, between now

and some taproot of time,

as if the temporal lobe had seized

on this pool in the skin, this fluid lens,

and telescoped instead

to a pond near woods

with frogs and nymphs and fish,

and by the water’s edge

a stand of reeds ― horsetail, I surmise, cauda equina ―

piercing the surface like needles

No plunger

drives the sun to its zenith,

retracts the shadows of trees,

pressures the breeze

to be wind,

nor does the mind,

which thinks it sees

the white coats of birches

but is more akin

to that orange disc climbing through branches

synaptic in all the circuitry

Nights,

when ripples are obsidian,

the moon

spills across the surface,

scatters a flotilla of lights

whose oily spangles buoy, conjoin,

yet always part

And here, in that timeless dark,

Syrinx appears,

a synthesis of moons

sheathed in halos of myelin film,

the flutings whorled

around her waist

like petals,

that place

where now she glides

an arm, the wrist turned in,

and effortlessly loosens the ties

that linens might slip from her skin

III.

This bloating sloughs

like fat off bone.

I return to burned-out husks

the columns collapsed

the cry of syllables

huddled in shelters

each vowel a child dragging its feet.

Where wires are down

a wireless crackles

and static animates the screen,

save for this glimpse of a green frog in my fist

and the teacher saying insert the needle here,

between the vertebrae,

then wiggle back and forth

to pith the cord

My reeds become water,

my memories

myth